Category: General

Conceptualised by Dentsu Webchutney, the spot features the ‘world’s fastest pianist’ Aman Bathla. He is challenged to play the famous song ‘My Heart Will Go On’ by Celine Dion on a piano made entirely of white keys.

The tune sounds very different from the well-known song, thus asserting that both black and white keys are important to create harmony.

C&G baby club UK have produced this fantastic video around the making of a song ‘to make babies happy’.

With thousands of shares already it is a great example of how you can create great content without blasting your brand all over it. But it’s approach once again challenges traditional marketers approach of telling people about their product and expecting them to rush out and buy.

So where is the benefit you may ask? Whilst they do not mention C&G Baby Club in the video – which points to soundofhappy.com the website does, providing that brand impression. By being less ‘in your face’ in the video people are more likely to view and share the video – especially compared to say a video just talking about their products.

‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ now it’s ‘A picture is worth a thousand clicks’ and ‘A video is worth a million pictures’.

Without an image on your web page if someone shares it on social media it is less likely to be clicked and therefore less likely to be shared.

Along with static images short, concise, informative and fun video content can help you massively increase your reach. Important to remember it’s not just about creating a video, there are millions of videos on YouTube with just tens of views,

Important to remember it’s not just about creating a video, there are millions of videos on YouTube with just tens of views. It’s about videos with useful content for your customer helping build trust and putting you at the front of their mind when they come to buy.

Together with great benefits that social media brings, it can also be challenging. Social media can bring negative comments, often with good reason. But how do you tell the difference between a valid negative comment and a troll? When is a comment worth responding to or when is it not?

This infographic is extremely useful in giving you a decision tree for when and if to respond. Beyond this businesses need to look at how feedback from social media can help an organisation by changing business practices and identify opportunities.

A couple of extra things to consider:

Never respond in anger (or after alcohol?). If the comment has annoyed you then maybe write down what you want to say, walk away and come back when you have calmed to see if what you were going to say still stands.

Be the better person. Others will read the comment and your response and you need them to come away thinking that you are being more reasonable.

Remember people don’t necessarily believe overly negative comments, and sometimes will come to your defence when people are unreasonable.

Keep perspective. Many of the worse trolls on Twitter have very few followers and even follow themselves from other accounts to give themselves some following. Even if someone has a few hundred followers the number who will see the post will be tiny – by responding you could be giving a troll a much bigger audience.

Even prior to the EU referendum I had struggled how to deal with some of the people I am connected with on Facebook, who on reflection I would prefer not to be. I spent months, weeks and the last few days seriously considering what to say. Here are my words that I shared publicly on Facebook.

Following the EUref normal Facebook service has been resumed. Where I will continue being anti-racism, pro workers rights, supporting the Labour Party, for equality and full of hope for future generations.

If you don’t like my posts, do us both a favour and do the simple thing and select unfriend. We can return to exchanging cards at special occasions, smiling and doing small talk at social events – it’s what we did before Facebook so why change that.

And if you share ‘Britain First’ posts I will not bother writing to you asking not to post this crap anymore. Family, colleague or friend – I will block you. This is not because I don’t believe in democracy and debate. It’s because there is no debate in hate. You are regurgitating the vomit of some of the most hateful aspects of our society and if anything the EU ref taught me it is we need to stand up to and expose these views and those who hold them louder than we have ever done before. We need to call hate – hate, a racist – racist, a sexist – sexist… Guessing you get the trend. Otherwise we allow these views to grow again with far more dangerous consequences.

If you don’t understand my view, you don’t understand me – so go on, go on – do us both a favour. For all those that do, thank you for your friendship even though we may often disagree – as a great woman said – we have more in common than that which divides us xxx

The idea of sharing other people’s content may still be alien to some marketers. Like it or not, it is an essential part of making sure your social media feed is followable and shareable. This is especially the case if you don’t have a regular stream of engaging content of your own.

I have used the 80/20 rule for sharing: 80% other people’s content and 20% of your own. Though if you don’t have a great deal of content I would go further. I would look at as high as 95% of others people’s content.

Why would you do this? On social media, you need to demonstrate that you are a trusted source of interesting content. You will then gain followers and they will look out for your posts. When you post your own content, as a trusted voice, they are more likely to click on and view your own content.

This does not replace the need for developing your own content. Marketers recognise whilst content curation is important, posting your own is not far behind.

Words are not enough. A weird way to start a blog – but in the battle for attention images are everything.

Video, infographics, photography and animation are key to capturing your audience’s attention. In social streams, you are competing against a whole range of exciting messages. To fight for attention you need to stand out in those streams. This is where these visual tools can come to your rescue.